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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scumbria who wrote (102370)	4/5/2000 6:08:00 PM
From: Cirruslvr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576608

Scumbria - RE: "It seems like niceguy has been making such outlandish predictions for some time now." Now that most of his predictions have come true, who is Paul going to pick on? If you hadn't noticed, lately the majority of his posts have been to Niceguy with the usual stuff being written.

To: Scumbria who wrote (102370)	4/5/2000 6:13:00 PM
From: chic_hearne	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1576608

1.2 GHz Thunderdbird beats a 1.5 GHz Willamette. The Willamette will have to reach significantly higher frequencies if it wants to beat the Thunderbird. Some of the basic numbers: BRANCH MISS-PREDICTION PENALTY. 1.2 GHz Thunderbird: 8.33 nanoseconds (10 cycles) 1.5 GHz Willamette: 13.33 nanoseconds (20 cycles) ALU TROUGHPUT: OPERATIONS PER SECOND 1.2 GHz Thunderbird: 1.2 ? 3.6 Billion sustained 1.5 GHz Willamette: 1.0 ?.4.5 Billion sustained MAXIMUM LEVEL 1 DATA CACHE LOAD / STORE BANDWIDTH 1.2 GHz Thunderbird: 3.6 Billion operands /second 1.5 GHz Willamette: 1.5? 3.0 Billion operands /second The branch miss prediction penalty is much higher on the Willamette. The Trace Cache doesn't help that much. The Instruction Cache on the Athlon contains partly pre-decoded instructions as well (like the K6 did) Each instruction byte has 3 additional bits to help accelerate branch prediction and instruction alignment of x86 instructions for the decoders. The sustained ALU trough put of the Willamette is higher but can contain more depencies and may actually end up somewhat lower. The Willamette ALU's don't perform all integer instructions themselves. (Shifts are much slower on the Willamette than on the P6 according to Intel) The databand width to the data cache is higher on the Thunderbird because it has 3 Address Generators which can do both loads and stores. The Willamette has a single load address generator and a single store address generator. Intel says: The Willamette will be 30% faster then Coppermine. In my opinion this is a 1.5 Willamette compared with a 1 GHz Coppermine. Thus 30% faster with equal semiconductor process and not with equal frequencies. COMMENT: I don't know this deep technical stuff. Is there any weight to this? chic